Today's starter topic: Platform bungling. Thanks to poor management by President Obama, the Democratic National Committee approved changes to its platform nixing any mention of God and also removing an affirmation of support for Israel.

What ought to have been a minor tempest in a tea pot turned into an embarrassment as the presidential campaign decided to reinsert itself into the story instead of just getting things fixed:

Platform stories rarely last long, though, because few people bother to read the platforms and candidates largely ignore them as well. Had Obama ignored the issue, as Romney had with the abortion plank the week before, it would have become a dusty footnote in history.

Instead, Obama and his team turned it into a headline-making embarrassment. The campaign couldn’t make up its mind if Obama had personally reviewed the platform before its adoption, or had never looked at it at all before the GOP made the omissions an issue. Everyone agreed on one thing, though: Obama personally ordered that the platform be amended to fix both problems — a process that would require a two-thirds vote on the floor to approve, since the convention delegates had already approved the platform. Ted Strickland and Cory Booker dutifully went back and wrote one amendment to cover the changes. No one apparently checked to see if either the recognition of Jerusalem or adding a mention of God would provoke significant opposition, nor did Obama have his team split the issues into separate amendments in order to isolate any opposition. [...]

Instead of ignoring the issue and letting it die a quiet death, as it would have done with the favorable media coverage at the convention, Obama’s leadership had a whole lot of Democrats appearing to vote against God Almighty — and booing Him, too. Suddenly, the nothingburger of a platform dispute erupted into headline-grabbing news, and even MSNBC was forced to cover it.